Tuesday, 15 November 2016

In The Toolbox – Season Two

As I pointed out in my blog post that collates Season One of my In The ToolboxC Vu column I never intended to write more than a couple of introductory articles before handing it over for others to share their experiences. Yet now, three years later, I’m still plugging away at it and Season Three is already in the making with a couple of episodes already under my belt.

Just as before I also strongly advise you to become a member of the ACCU so you can get this, plus loads of much better content, which may or may not be published online by their respective authors. As I write this post it’s still only a measly £45 per year and is one of the last remaining printed journals about programming.

We have so many ideas for our products but only so many hours in the day to develop them. Sometimes all it needs is a simple text file in the repo, whilst bigger projects seem to demand an enterprise-grade solution like JIRA.

As programmers we need a safe environment in which to write and test our code, free from the distractions going on around us. When running the tests it should not be at the mercy of other developers running tests at the same time as us; first and foremost we start in isolation, if we can.

It’s a simple question: how do you find a piece of text? And yet there is a dizzying array of choices available that depend heavily on what’s accessible at the time and where and how that elusive text is stored.

In the move to go digital the humble whiteboard has been pushed aside, which is disappointing as it’s still probably the best design tool available. It also has many other uses than drawing pictures of boxes, drums and cylinders.